Last week I got an early Christmas present from my friends at Chronicle Books. They’re starting a holiday campaign called #GiveBooks, and asked if I wanted to pick myself any 10 books from their archives! Lucky me right? Well, lucky you too because I also get to send all 10 books to one of you! How does that sound?

“Villari took no notice of them because the idea of a coincidence between
art and reality was alien to him. Unlike people who read novels, he
never saw himself as a character in a work of art.

-Jorge Luis Borges “The Waiting”

Frida Stenmark

This, in Swedish: “Det enda som hjälper mot tankar är hud”, from the book Diva by Monika Fagerholm, I guess, in English, it would be something like “The only thing that helps against thoughts are skin”

Ellen

“There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars.” -On The Road, Jack Kerouac

Christoph

“The Edge…There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others-the living-are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later. But the edge is still Out there.”

― Hunter S. Thompson, Hell’s Angels

Annika

“Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly.” From Inkheart by Cornelia Funke.

hetainkeri

“Those who were on the inside, the majority that is, for them it had been hard to get his point, mostly they were just pleased that they were on the inside, that they were the fittest.
For those on the outside, the fear and abandonment amounts to almost everything; everybody knows that.
Understanding is something one does best when one is on the borderline.”
Peter Hoeg “Borderliners”

maggie

me! I do! These books are all so lovely — my favorite passage of the moment is from a Dave Eggers book, “What is the What”

“I will not wait to love as best as I can. We thought we were young and that there would be time to love well sometime in the future. This is a terrible way to think. It is no way to live, to wait to love.”
― Dave Eggers, What is the What

“Just go on dancing with me like this forever, Garraty, and I’ll never tire. We’ll scrape our shoe on the stars and hang upside down from the moon.”

It’s heartbreaking how my favourite quote in the book was uttered out of delirium. From Stephen King’s “The Long Walk”.

alireza

“And therein lies the whole of man’s plight. Human time does not turn
in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot
be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.”– Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Guest

Proverbs for Paranoids:
1. You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.
2. The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master.
3. If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.
4. You hide, they seek.
5. Paranoids are not paranoid because they’re paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.

That very night in Max’s room, a forest grew, and grew, and grew, until the ceiling hung with vines and the wall became the world all around.

rui vitorino santos

“I don’t think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.”

José Saramago in Blindness/Ensaio sobre a cegueira

Ian G

My favorite section from “The Circular Ruins” by Jorge Luis Borges. It is about a man constructing a human in his dreams, one worthy of entering the physical world…

“He dreamed that it was warm, secret, about the size of a clenched fist, and of a garnet color within the penumbra of a human body as yet without face or sex; during fourteen lucid nights he dreampt of it with meticulous love. Every night he perceived it more clearly. He did not touch it; he only permitted himself to witness it, to observe it, and occasionally to rectify it with a glance. He perceived it and lived it from all angles and distances. On the fourteenth night he lightly touched the pulmonary artery with his index finger, then the whole heart, outside and inside. He was satisfied with the examination. He deliberately did not dream for a night; he took up the heart again, invoked the name of a planet, and undertook the vision of another of the principle organs. Within a year he had come to the skeleton and the eyelids. The innumerable hair was perhaps the most difficult task. He dreamed an entire man‐‐a young man, but who did not sit up or talk, who was unable to open his eyes. Night after night, the man dreamt him asleep.”

GABE

“So it goes.”
Kurt Vonnegut
-Slaughterhouse-Five

Joe Bun Keo

“Lots of people talk to animals,” said Pooh.
“Not that many listen
though.”
“That’s the problem.”

“That’s the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.”
― Charles Bukowski, from book called “Women”.

Doss Hill

From Japanese author Haruki Murakami’s novel 1Q84: “Maybe nothing will ever be constant. The only constant thing being the continual waxing and waining – the never ending motion. And maybe things only stop changing at the moment of death. And that moment is a snapshot that lasts for eternity, a still picture of the moment when changes cease.”

M. Gordy

“After all, the best part of a holiday is perhaps not so much to be resting yourself, as to see all the other fellows busy working.”
-Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

“While men believe in the infinite, some ponds will be thought to be bottomless.” – Henry David Thoreau ~ Walden

Sophie Derugen-Toomey

“THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO THINK CONTRACEPTION IS IMMORAL BECAUSE THE OBJECT OF COPULATION IS PROCREATION. IN A SIMILAR WAY THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO THINK THE ONLY REASON TO READ A BOOK IS TO WRITE A BOOK; PEOPLE SHOULD CALL UP BOOKS FROM THE DUST AND THE DARK AND WRITE THOUSANDS OF WORDS TO BE SENT DOWN TO THE DUST AND THE DARK WHICH CAN BE CALLED UP SO THAT OTHER PEOPLE CAN SEND FURTHER THOUSANDS OF WORDS TO JOIN THEM IN THE DUST AND THE DARK. SOMETIMES A BOOK CAN BE CALLED FROM THE DUST AND THE DARK TO PRODUCE A BOOK WHICH CAN BE BOUGHT IN SHOPS, AND PERHAPS IT IS INTERESTING, BUT THE PEOPLE WHO BUY IT AND READ IT BECAUSE IT IS INTERESTING ARE NOT SERIOUS PEOPLE, IF THEY WERE SERIOUS THEY WOULD NOT CARE ABOUT THE INTEREST THEY WOULD BE WRITING THOUSANDS OF WORDS TO CONSIGN TO THE DUST AND THE DARK. THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO THINK DEATH A FATE WORSE THAN BOREDOM.”

– The Last Samurai, Helen Dewitt.

juan santiago tinarmod

A nervous illness never incurable never which never tortures me for many years never forces me never to end my days.
I pay never with my life for the sins of my parents never my heredity never was burden. If I never did no one wrong I never ask for forgiveness.

“Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups… So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power.”

-Philip K. Dick, How to build a universe that doesn’t fall apart two days later.

“Do you understand what I’m trying to say? Rather than admire the mediocre great men over whom passersby nudge each other in awe, I venerate the young, unknown geniuses who die in their teens, their souls shattered delicate, phosphorescent glowworms that one must see to know they really did exist. That’s how I feel.”

Knut Hamsun – Mysteries

Lily X.

Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous coincidence into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual’s life. Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.

“The stiff blades of the grass pricked at my back through the thinnish material of my school uniform. Lifting the cigarette high in the air, my eyes half-closed, I gazed avidly at the smoke trailing in to the shadowy blue of the afternoon sky. It rose gracefully; it lingered, wavered in an almost imperceptible cloud; like a dream before waking, it took shape only, ineffectually, to dissolve again.”

– Yukio Mishima’s short story “Cigarette”, in the volume titled “Acts of Worship.”

“I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even sex. Just sleep together, in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.” – Looking For Alaska

“He was no longer quite sure whether anything he had ever thought or felt was truly his own property, or whether his thoughts were merely a common part of the world’s store of ideas which had always existed ready-made and which people only borrowed, like books from a library.”

“If you are a dreamer, come in,
If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar,
A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer…
If you’re a pretender come sit by my fire
For we have some flax-golden tales to spin.
Come in!
Come in!”

This is love, she thought, isn’t it? When you notice someone’s absence and hate that absence more than anything? More, even, than you love his presence?
-Everything is Illuminated

Lacey Prpić Hedtke

No babe
We’d never
Swing together but
the syncopation
would be something wild
― Diane di Prima, Revolutionary Letters

Guest

“Anyone whose goal is ‘something higher’ must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.” – The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Shea

To live fully, one must be free, but to be free one must give up security. Therefore, to live one must be ready to die. How’s that for a paradox?

― Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Julia Goodman

“Anyone whose goal is ‘something higher’ must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.” – Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“it was decorated with a drastically color-saturated daytime photograph of the New York skyline, complete with the black towers of the World Trade Center.These were so intensely peculiar-looking, in retrospect, so monolithically sci-fi blank, unreal, that they now seemed to Milgrim to have been Photoshopped into every image he encountered them in.” spook country WIlliam Gibson

cleo sallis

“Lights on buildings and everything that makes you wonder. Sam sat down and started laughing. Patrick started laughing. I started laughing. And in that moment, I swear we were infinite.”

– Stephen Chbosky from The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Benjamin Kowalski

“Thinking is a momentary dismissal of irrelevancies.”
– Buckminster Fuller
Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects of Humanity (1969)

“Embryos are like photograph film,” said Mr. Foster waggishly, as he pushed open the second door. “They can only stand red light.” And in effect the sultry darkness into which the students now followed him was visible and crimson, like the darkness of closed eyes on a summer’s afternoon.”

a) this is dangerous – i do not need to know there is a 30% off discount code for chronicle.
b) great book choices
c)“But now,” says the Once-ler, “now that you’re here, the word of the Lorax seems perfectly clear. UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” – The Lorax

‘Lennie said softly, “I di’n’t forget, you bet, God damn. Hide in the brush an’
wait for George.” He pulled his hat down low over his eyes. “George gonna
give me hell,” he said. “George gonna wish he was alone an’ not have me
botherin’ him.” He turned his head and looked at the bright mountain tops. “I
can go right off there an’ find a cave,” he said. And he continued sadly, “—an’
never have no ketchup—but I won’t care. If George don’t want me . . . . I’ll go
away. I’ll go away.”’

Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

tiny v

“She was a box, full of staff, which had thrown away its own key”

-Clare Boylan, Black Baby-

Anna

“You’re not Dostoevsky,’ said the citizeness, who was getting muddled by Koroviev.

Well, who knows, who knows,’ he replied.
‘Dostoevsky’s dead,’ said the citizeness, but somehow not very confidently.
‘I protest!’ Behemoth exclaimed hotly. ‘Dostoevsky is immortal!”

― Mikhail Bulgakov, “The Master & Margarita”

Erik Dutcher

“In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn’t squeak.”

-Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All

Ben

“It’s the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top.”
Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance – Robert M. Pirsig

emileee

“Who knows how to make love stay?
1. Tell love you are going to Junior’s Deli on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to pick up a cheesecake and if love stays, it can have half. It will stay.
2. Tell love you want a memento of it and obtain a lock of its hair. Burn the hair in a dime-store incense burner with yin/yang symbols on three sides. Face southwest. Talk fast over the burning hair in a convincingly exotic language. Remove the ashes of the burnt hair and use them to paint a mustache on your face. Find love. Tell it you are someone new. It will stay.
3. Wake love up in the middle of the night. Tell it the world is on fire. Dash to the bedroom window and pee out of it. Casually return to bed and assure love that everything is going to be all right. Fall asleep. Love will be there in the morning.” -Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins

Laura

“Beautiful things grow to a certain height and then they fail and fade off, breathing out memories as they decay. And just as any period decays in our minds, the things of that period should decay too, and in that way they’re preserved for a while in the few hearts like mine that react to them.”

“I live in my dreams — that’s what you sense. Other people live in dreams, but not in their own.”
~Demian, Herman Hesse

Guest

“Here’s what I think, Mr. Wind-Up Bird,” said May Kasahara. “Everybody’s
born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that
thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person
from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But
sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it
shakes me up. What I’d really like to do is find a way to communicate
that feeling to another person. But I can’t seem to do it. They just
don’t get it. Of course, the problem could be that I’m not explaining it
very well, but I think it’s because they’re not listening very well.
They pretend to be listening, but they’re not, really. So I get worked
up sometimes, and I do some crazy things.”
– The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

“Do you think that there are many of my kind. People like me who live, as they did not live. Who steal through their own lives, cautious and shy, as if they would not include them, as if they had no right to reside therein. As if we were thieves.”

– Dea Loher, Diebe

erica

Bendemolina Bedemolina run home and tell the children to put the soap in the cake.

Julianne Rooney

“Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty.”

-Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

Madeleine Horst

Describing the ocean
“… for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing ike slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness.”
-Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Dana McClure

“The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.” – The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin 1936

“I remember in no particular order…” Julian Barnes The Sense of an Ending

Evan

It didn’t matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were
girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn’t heard us
calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our
thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where
they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper
than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back
together again.
– Jeffrey Eugenides “The Virgin Suicides”

“The Edge…There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others-the living-are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later. But the edge is still Out there.”

― Hunter S. Thompson, Hell’s Angels

Lewis Abraham

“Space,” it says “is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.”
– Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy

jaycie

“When you own nothing, it’s easy to let things go.”
-Jerry Spinelli

rooroo88

“And so I watch, a little enviously, the dogs with their eyes of molten wax, the yellow arch of lust, the throbbing, thrusting, connecting rod, red flaked and marbled white and veiny blue. The colors of the mammal race. I yearn, I yearn for one more day, one more hour of love and lazy exertion in that slow, unstately dance, ancient, eternal, that primal nepenthe beyond drink and drugs.”
– Judd Breslau peering out the window of his prison cell.

“People like you to be something, preferably what they are.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Grace H.

“I must say a word about fear. It is life’s only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unnerving ease. It begins in your mind, always … so you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don’t, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.”
– Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“No sooner had one season slipped out the door than the next came in by another door. A person might scramble to the closing door and call out, Hey, wait a minute, there’s one last thing that I forgot to tell you. But nobody would be there any more. The door shuts tight. Already another season is in the room, sitting in a chair, striking a match to light a cigarette. Anything you forgot to mention, the stranger says, you might as well go ahead and tell me, and if it works out, I’ll get the message through. Nah, it’s okay, you say, it was nothing really. And all around, the sound of the wind. Nothing, really. A season’s died, that’s all.”

—Haruki Murakami, “Pinball, 1973”

Dino Kuznik

“I quote others only the better to express myself.”
Michel de Montaigne

“Insight, vision. What you remember is determined by what you see, and what you see depends on what you remember. A cycle that has to be broken. And this requires a fierce concentration on the process itself: Focus on the order of things, sort out the flow of events so as to understand how one thing led to another, search for the point at which what happened had been extended into a vision of what might have happened. Where was the fulcrum? Where did it tilt from fact to imagination?”

– Going After Cacciato

Nancy LW

“It hurts to love. It’s like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.” Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals & Notebooks, 1947-1963

katrina

I told him, only half joking, about how I imagined the soul of each person, myself included, as being a sort of flexible neon tube inside. All the tube could do was receive news about what was happening to the meat, over which it had no control.
“So when people I like do something terrible,” I said, I just flense them and forgive them.”
“Flense?” he said. “What’s flense?”
“It’s what whalers used to do to whale carcasses when they got them on board,” I said. “They would strip off the skin and blubber and meat right down to the skeleton. I can do that in my head to people–get rid of all the meat so I can see nothing but their souls. Then I forgive them.”
“And that’s not true,” she said.
“We’re having a celebration, so all sorts of things have been said which are not true,” I said. “That’s how to act at a party.”

-Vonnegut, Bluebeard

Bejan Siavoshy

“Frodo began his tale. ‘I smoke crack for two months in Amsterdam, Julie. Beautiful crack. Then I buy a Jaguar and ship it to Mombasa. Beautiful Jaguar. I pick up the Jaguar in Mombasa. It’s evening, huh? I have this beautiful crack, so I say to myself ‘Frodo, I have my crack, I have my Jaguar, I have all blaadifackin’ night to drive to Nairobi. Let’s go!’ So I have my crack pipe in one hand and I have one hand on the steering wheel, okay Julie, when a blaadifackin’ truck hits me right in front. My beautiful Jaguar, she is finito, my leg, shit is finito, and you know Julie? Those police bastards are accusing me of being dangerous driver!’ ” — Aidan Hartley, The Zanzibar Chest

“She was truly a beautiful girl. I could feel a small polished stone sinking through the darkest waters of my heart. All those deep convoluted channels and passageways, and yet she managed to toss her pebble right down to the bottom of it all.”
― Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance

Once Dostoevsky had a clogged nostril. Blew through – broke a membrane in the ear. Plugged that with a cork – it turned out to be too big and fractured his skull… So he tied it with a string – realised that the mouth doesn’t open anymore. Suddenly he woke up in disbelief, God rest his soul.
– Daniil Kharms –

Laura

We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love eachother but it doesn’t.We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.

-Charles Bukowski, ‘the captain is out to lunch and the sailors have taken over the ship’.

“But women need solitude in order to find again the true essence of themselves: that firm strand which will be the indispensable centre of a whole web of human relationships…. the stilling of the soul within the activities of the mind and body so that it might be still as the axis of a revolving wheel is still”.
Gift From the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindberg 1955

“Clarissa had a theory in those days – they had heaps of theories, always theories, as young people have. It was to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known. For how could they know each other? You met every day; then not for six months, or years. It was unsatisfactory, they agreed, how little one knew people. But she said, sitting on the bus going up Shaftesbury Avenue, she felt herself everywhere; not ‘here, here, here’; and she tapped the back of the seat; but everywhere. She waved her hand, going up Shaftesbury Avenue. She was all that. So that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places. Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoke to, some women in the street, some man behind a counter – even trees, or barns. It ended in a transcendental theory which, with her horror of death, allowed her to believe, or say that she believed (for all her scepticism), that since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places, after death. Perhaps – perhaps.”- Mrs Dalloway

I thought to go with Kerouac’s firecracker line about the ones that really burn to live. I thought to go with Thompson’s opening screed in Fear and Loathing. Instead you get an ode to a future these books will never share in my well-used possession:

“Much as I love old, used books, there is something undeniably special about an old, pristine book. Though its dust jacket may be unwrinkled there is a certain dull shimmer off its smooth, unpimpled
surface that is quite unlike a copy fresh from the publisher’s case. Its crisp jacket is buffed to high gloss as its myriad fellows are plucked from the shelves year after year. You may know nothing of the paper mill pulp processes, filtration screen densities, flax, cotton, hay, birch, pine, preconsumer, postconsumer, virginal, harlot goddess timber content of that paper in your hands, but the grip, the grain, they will speak even to strangers. A beautiful,
uncracked volume from a century past lays heavy in your hands, yet IT holds you.

It calls to you from between the covers where it has been waiting oh so long. It wasn’t ready for all those years, but now, now it knows that you – italically perched on the tips of your Y? O! U’s, You are the one to share its secrets. You’ve seen other copies before, but they could have held anything inside. Over two hundred million copies of A Tale of Two Cities have been sold, but for all you know they’re full of random jottings and ink blottings of incoherent drivel except for the slim, spare red volume before you. A ‘Fine’ copy of Dickens capital T tale hasn’t been on the market in years, but you could trade it straight away for a house if you knew which side your bread was buttered.”

“O how incomprehensible everything was, and actually sad, although it was also beautiful. One knew nothing. One lived and ran about the earth and rode through forests, and certain things looked so challenging and promising and nostalgic: a star in the evening, a blue harebell, a reed-green pond, the eye of a person or a cow. And sometimes it seemed that something never seen yet long desired was about to happen, that a veil would drop from it all, but then it passed, nothing happened, the riddle remained unsolved, the secret spell unbroken, and in the end one grew old and looked cunning . . . or wise . . . and still one knew nothing perhaps, was still waiting and listening.”

-Hermann Hesse, “Narcissus and Goldmund”

Dave

“In this reviewer’s opinion, the only really coherent position on the abortion issue is one that is both Pro-life and Pro-choice.

Given our best present medical and philosophical understandings of what makes something not just a living organism but a person, there is no way to establish at just what point during gestation a fertilized ovum becomes a human being. This conundrum, together with the basically inarguable soundness of the principle “When in irresolvable doubt about whether something is a human being or not, it is better not to kill it,” appears to me to require any reasonable American to be Pro-Life.

At the same time, however, the principle “When in irresolvable doubt about something, I have neither the legal nor the moral right to tell another person what to do about it, especially if that person feels that s/he is not in doubt” is an unassailable part of the Democratic pact we Americans all make with one another, a pact in which each adult citizen gets to be an autonomous moral agent; and this principle appears to me to require any reasonable American to be Pro-Choice.”

‘The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness-a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the Sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild.’ – Jack London, White Fang 1906

Courtney Tex

“Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings,photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water,light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic.” ~ Jim Jarmusch quote from the book Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon

Brandon

“They have a right to do anything we can’t stop them from doing.”
Catch-22, Joseph Heller

“I shake my head. ‘I have a feeling you’re about to come to a turning point.’
‘You’re right,’ Oshima says, ‘That’s how stories happen – with a turning point, an unexpected twist. There’s only one kind of happiness, but misfortune comes in all shapes and sizes. It’s like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story. Anyway . . .'”
– Haruki Murakami, “Kakfa on the Shore”

Julie Hsu

“Despite the fact that they would always completely ignore me whenever we went on our walks together, they couldn’t just go and have a walk without me. This revealed a profoundly philosophical bent in these dogs which were not mine, because they had worked out that I had to be there in order for them to be able to ignore me properly. You can’t ignore someone who isn’t there, because that’s not what ‘ignore’ means.”

– Douglas Adams, “Maggie and Trudie”

Joel Furtado

“I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.”

– J.R.R. Tolkien (I got hobbits on the brain)

Haley McLain

“It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live, remember that.”

Fran R.

“I think about all this something when I’m watching a football game with Patrick and Sam. I look at the field, and I think about the boy who just made the touchdown. I think that these are the glory days for that boy, and this moment will just be another story someday because all the people who make touchdowns and home runs will become somebody’s dad. And when his children look at his yearbook photograph, they will think that their dad was rugged and handsome and looked a lot happier than they are.
I just hope I remember to tell my kids that are as happy as I look in my old photographs. And i hope that they believe me.
Love always,
Charlie”
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

Matt Wicke

“Things are sweeter when they’re lost. I know-because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it it turned to dust in my hand.”

-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

ariel wilson

“as any two people who have ever dressed in matching pajamas will attest, it was surprisingly effective.” -The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body… . The poet shall not spend his time in unneeded work. – walt whitman; leaves of grass

“Then, brothers, it came. Oh, bliss, bliss and heaven. I lay all nagoy to the ceiling, my gulliver on my rookers on the pillow, glazzies closed, rot open in bliss, slooshying the sluice of lovely sounds. Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh.”

—Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

Sheila Wagner

“What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through little speakers, which could be in the pouches of our overalls? When you skateboarded down the street at night you could hear everyone’s heartbeat, and they could hear yours, sort of like sonar. One weird thing is, I wonder if everyone’s hearts would start to beat at the same time, like how women who live together have their menstrual periods at the same time, which I know about, but don’t really want to know about. That would be so weird, except that the place in the hospital where babies are born would sound like a crystal chandelier in a houseboat, because the babies wouldn’t have had time to match up their heartbeats yet. And at the finish line at the end of the New York City Marathon it would sound like war.”

“Aomame tried her best to keep her mind clear of any thoughts, but it was impossible not to think of anything. Nature abhors a vacuum”

LeilaVS

Not a quote from a book, but a poet nonetheless:
‘And clenching your fist for the ones like us who are oppressed by the figures of beauty”
Leonard Cohen, Chelsea hotel number 2

Alice

“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary-wise; what it is it wouldn’t be, and what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see? ” Lewis Carroll, Alice In Wonderland

I come here for design. It happens every time the subject strays beyond fonts and layout software. (“Obscure references … trying to impress each other… please, can we start talking some sense?”) In these cases, our visitors react like diners who just got served penne alla vodka in a Mexican restaurant: it’s not the kind of dish they came for, and they doubt the proprietors have the expertise to serve it up….

[T]he great thing about graphic design is that it is almost always about something else. Corporate law. Professional football. Art. Politics. Robert Wilson. And if I can’t get excited about whatever that something else is, I really have trouble doing good work as a designer. To me, the conclusion is inescapable: the more things you’re interested in, the better your work will be.

Taryn Trousdale

“He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark mustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”

Ahliyah

” I have feet the size of boats”
– The Princess Diaries

Bernadette

“Just that,” said the fox. “To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world…” – Antoine de Saint-Exupry, “The Little Prince”

Michelle Moy

“Dr. Armonson stitched up her wrist wounds. Withen 5 minutes of the transfusion he declared her out of danger. Chucking her under the chin, he said, “What are you doing here, honey? You’re not even old enough to know how bad life gets.” And it was then Cecelia gave orally what was to be her only form of suicide note, and a useless one at that, because she was going to live: “Obviously, Doctor,” she said, “you’ve never been a 13 year old girl.” The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

“People like you to be something, preferably what they are.”
― John Steinbeck

ccker

“In spite of wars and tourism and pictures by satellite, the world is just the same size as it ever was. It is awesome to think how much of it I will never see. It is no trick to go round the world these days; you can pay a lot of money and fly round it nonstop in less that forty eight hours, but to know it, to smell it and feel it between your toes you have to crawl. There is no other way. Not flying, not floating. You have to stay on the ground and swallow the bugs as you go. Then the world is immense.”—Ted Simon (from his book Jupiter’s Travels)

Gimme hate, Lord,” he whimpered. “I’ll take hate any day. But don’t give me love. I can’t take no more love, Lord. I can’t carry it…It’s too heavy. Jesus, you know, You know all about it. Ain’t it heavy? Jesus? Ain’t love heavy?”

-Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

Grace Lee

“Spend your money on the things money can buy. Spend your time on the things money can’t buy.”

– Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Guest

“I’m a licensed private investigator and have been for quite a while.
I’m a lone wolf, unmarried, getting middle-aged, and not rich. I’ve been
in jail more than once and I don’t do divorce business. I like liquor
and women and chess and a few other things. The cops don’t like me too
well, but I know a couple I get along with. I’m a native son, born in
Santa Rosa, both parents dead, no brothers or sisters, and when I get
knocked off in a dark alley sometime, if it happens, as it could to
anyone in my business, nobody will feel that the bottom has dropped out
of his or her life.”

― Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

Sarah Chan

“I’m a licensed private investigator and have been for quite a while. I’m a lone wolf, unmarried, getting middle-aged, and not rich. I’ve been
in jail more than once and I don’t do divorce business. I like liquor
and women and chess and a few other things. The cops don’t like me too
well, but I know a couple I get along with. I’m a native son, born in
Santa Rosa, both parents dead, no brothers or sisters, and when I get
knocked off in a dark alley sometime, if it happens, as it could to
anyone in my business, nobody will feel that the bottom has dropped out
of his or her life.”

― Raymond Chandler, “The Long Goodbye”

Sestinas Morales

“I was anti-everything and everyone. I didn’t want people around me. This aversion was not some big crippling anxiety; merely a mature recognition of my own psychological vulnerability and my lack of suitability as a companion. Thoughts jostled for space in my crowded brain as i struggled to give them some order which might serve to motivate my listless life.”

― Irvine Welsh, The Acid House

evelin

i love this quote, its one of the best quotes I’ve read, i read trainspotting by irvine welsh so i cant wait to check out the acid house

[Speaking of you-know-who] “Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t, but the fact remains he can move faster than Severus Snape confronted with shampoo when he wants to” – Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K.Rowling

Megan S

“Being a woman is a fate Sabina did not chose. What we have not chosen we cannot consider either our merit or our failure. To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it.” The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

Nicole Wong

The man himself lay in the bed.

For a long while we just stood there, looking down at the profound and fleshless grin. The body had apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the grimace of love, had cuckolded him. What was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable from the bed in which he lay; and upon him and upon the pillow beside him lay that even coating of the patient and biding dust.

Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair.

– William Faulkner, “A Rose for Emily” <- A short story!

Rob T

“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.” -Harper Lee, “To Kill A Mocking Bird”

Julia

“A bumblebee isn’t supposed to fly. The law of aerodynamics of something. Its body is too heavy and it’s the wrong shape. The wingspread, too, is wrong for its size and shape. That makes it impossible that it should fly. But Know what? The bumblebee doesn’t know about the laws of aerodynamics. So it goes ahead and flies, anyway. And, they say manages to make a little honey every day.”

“Well, I say, we all have to start somewhere if us want to do better, and our own self is what us have to hand.” -The Color Purple

PVN

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.” – The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger –

Jon Conway

“We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.” – the preface of The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

“1 Area: Infinite.
The Guide offers this definition of the word ‘Infinite’.
Infinite: Bigger than the biggest thing ever and then some. Much bigger than that, in fact, really amazingly immense, a totally stunning size, real ‘wow, that’s big’ time. Infinity is just so big that by comparison bigness itself looks really titchy. Gigantic multiplied by colossal multiplied by staggeringly huge is the sort of concept we’re trying to get across here…
… 6 Art: None.
The function of art is to hold the mirror up to nature, and there simply isn’t a mirror big enough – see point one.”

– Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

matt

‘I come from under the hill, and under the hills and over the hills my
paths led. And through the air. I am he that walks unseen. I am the
clue-finder, the web-cutter, the stinging fly. I was chosen for the
lucky number. I am he that buries his friends alive and drowns them and draws them alive again from the water. I came from the end of bag, but no bag went over me. I am the friend of bears and the guest of eagles. I am Ring-winner and Luckwearer; and I am Barrel-rider.’
– tolkien, the hobbit

‘She looked at her hand in surprise where it rested on the man’s body, as though remonstrating with it for behaving so wilfully in the absence of proper adult supervision. She wondered what to do. If she plucked it away, it would seem rude, perhaps. Perhaps it would betray the fact that she had put it there unconsciously, and he would surmise that it bespoke feelings on her part that she would not like to have avowed either to him or to herself. Perhaps if she just left it there as though it belonged to someone else she would be able to disown responsibility for its actions. But what if he suddenly noticed where it was? If she moved it, he would instantly realise by virtue of where it had been that it had in fact been upon his shoulder; and if she did not move it, then he might realise that it was there, and make something of the fact that it had not been moved.’

The pianist explaining why he never got off the boat:
“It wasn’t what I saw that stopped me. It was what I didn’t see.
You understand that? What I didn’t see. In all that sprawling city there was everything except an end. There was no end. What I did not see was where the whole thing came to an end. The end of the world…
Take a piano. The keys begin. And the keys end. You know there are eighty-eight of them, nobody can fool you. They are not
infinite. But *you* are infinite. And on these keys the music that you can make is infinite. They are only 88, but you are infinite. I like that. That I can live by. But if you/
But if I get up on that gangway and out in front of me is a
keyboard of millions of keys, millions and billions/
Millions and billions of keys that never end, and that’s the authentic truth. That they never end. That keyboard is
infinite. So/
On that keyboard there is no music you can’t play. You’re sitting on the wrong bench. That piano, it’s the one God plays.”
-Novecento: Pianist by Alessandro Baricco

I loved reading everyone else’s passages, I made of list of books I want to read.

Tabitha Burnett

“I had never told her how much I loved her.She was my sister.
We slept in the same bed.
There was never a right time to say it.
It was always unnecessary.
The books in my father’s shed were sighing.
The sheets were rising and falling around me with Anna’s breathing.
I thought about waking her
but it was unnecessary.
There would be other nights.
And how can you say I love you to someone you love?”
from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

evelin

“I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was hurricane.” ― John Green, Looking for Alaska

evelin

I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was hurricane.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

rooroo88

“I went to see the Beatles last month… And I heard 20,000 girls screaming together at the Beatles… and I couldn’t hear what they were screaming, either… But you don’t have to… They’re screaming Me! Me! Me! Me!… I’m Me!… That’s the cry of the ego, and that’s the cry of this rally!… Me! Me! Me! Me!… And that’s why wars get fought… ego… because enough people want to scream Pay attention to Me… Yep, you’re playing their game…”
― Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

rooroo88

“And what is literature, Rabo,” he said, “but an insider’s newsletter about affairs relating to molecules, of no importance to anything in the universe but a few molecules who have the disease called ‘thought’.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Bluebeard

“She likes to dream that she’s the queen and that when the rest are dead there”ll be no one who can order her to do anything. She said, dear, that she’d burn down the whole place, burn down Gormenghast when she was the ruler and she’d live on her own, and I said she was wicked, and she said that everyone was — everyone and everything except rivers, clouds, and some rabbits. She makes me frightened sometimes.”

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed to a gigantic insect.”
– Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

Aimbalaim

” The ditty was sung to the familiar tune of ‘O Christmas Tree,’ but the words were unexpected.
‘O woe is me!
O woe is me!
I used to have a Hamster Tree!
But it was eaten by a newt,
And now I have no cuddly fruit!
O woe is me!
O woe is me!
I used to have a Hamster Treeee!’ ”

Ok now google helps: I want everything we do to be beautiful. I don’t give a damn whether the client understands that that’s worth anything, or that the client thinks it’s worth anything, or whether it is worth anything. It’s worth it to me. It’s the way I want to live my life. I want to make beautiful things, even if nobody cares.” ~Saul Bass

“I like cigarettes, Miss Taggart. I like to think of fire held in a man’s hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips. I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone, watching the smoke of a cigarette, thinking. I wonder what great things have come from such hours. when man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind-and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression.”
“Do they ever think?” she asked involuntarily
-Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

Kari Breitigam

“Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

-Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

Tomato Sonnet

“The” – The Bible.

Whitney Wong

“I’ll never see them again. I know that. And they know that. And knowing this, we say farewell.”

Narrator: You wake up at Seatac, SFO, LAX. You wake up at O’Hare, Dallas-Fort Worth, BWI. Pacific, mountain, central. Lose an hour, gain an hour. This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time. You wake up at Air Harbor International. If you wake up at a different time, in a different place, could you wake up as a different person?

Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

Natalie Harris

“Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.” – Aldous Huxley Brave New World

Julia

“A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, on the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”-James Joyce, The Dead

“Despite the dreary scenery, it’s all very sexual, these towns. It’s only the individual who attains an early beauty and sexuality who becomes trapped here. The young men and women who acquire perfect breasts and muscles before they know how best to use that power, they end up pregnant and mired so close to home. This cycle concentrates the best genetics in places you’d never imagine. Like Middleton. Little nests of wildly attractive idiots who give birth and survive into a long, ugly adulthood. Venuses and Apollos. Small-town gods and goddesses. If Middleton has produced one remarkable product in the tedious, dull, dust history of this community that extraordinary product was Rant Casey.” – Chuck Palahniuk, “Rant”

Jesse Wilcox

“Most of what happens in our lives takes place in our absence: but I seem to have found from somewhere the trick of filling in the gaps in my knowledge, so that everything is in my head, down to the last detail, such as the way the mist seemed to slant across the early morning air… everything, and not just the few clues one stumbles across, for instance by opening an old tin trunk which should have remained cobwebby and closed.”
-Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

Lauren

“Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the world, I mean everybody. No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe.” – Neil Gaimen, The Sandman

Vytas Neviera

“When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.”
― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

Amy

“The river is everywhere.”

-Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha.

Kaaren Magnuson

“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” – Albus Dumbledore

”I have known those abortions of the
spirit, the awareness of the failures, the knowledge of the times
when the spirit falls into darkness, is lost. These have been the
daily bread of my days, my constant obsessional quest for the
irretrievable.”
Anais Nin – Je Suis le Plus Malade des Surrealistes

Patrick Maxcy

“Time and distance have a way of playing tricks with your best intentions.”
― Anthony Kiedis, Scar Tissue

“remember when you were innocent and i was pretty? we dressed as wolves and stole the night to save in pocketfuls to remind us that daylight wasn’t never-ending. i think you swallowed some when you weren’t careful and it slipped. right down to the back of your tongue and you gulped in surprise. now all the girls say you’ve got starry starry eyes and i laughed but i could still see the night. hush, hush the still light. don’t let the howling unfold your dark corners, remember we were the wolves it’s only us. we were so emphatically exposed, spending our time whispering in the shadows and now ours are darker too. i put words in my pockets just to bring them out indecipherable and dripping in that night-time blue. they taste like frozen berries on your lips. they were stained blue and you said ‘we were so silly, daylight’s always been infinite, it just moves where we can’t follow.’ ” oceansandmilk: strawberries & tea

Everyone has his own reality in which, if one is not too cautious, timid, or frightened, one swims. This is the only reality
there is.
Henry Miller, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird

Sarah Blum

“They had no licence for selling liquor, but there was no law yet against prodding some of the new veshches which they used to put into the old moloko, so you could peet it with vellocet or snythemesc or drencrom or one or two other veshches which would give you a nice quiet horrorshow fifteen minutes admiring Bog And All His Holy Angels And Saints in your left shoe with lights bursting all over your mozg.” — Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange, page 1. That’s how I knew it was going to be something special.

“I want others to go out in the world with an idea, with intentions and means, and come back with a story about how their actions affected the world and how they themselves were shaped by the results.”—You Shall Know Our Velocity, by Dave Eggers

tenzin

“I want you always to remember me. Will you remember that I existed, and that I stood next to you here like this?”

Brent Wilson

“Will Mr. Dr. Doctor help when you have the baby?” asks Freddie.
“He will be there if he can,” says Mrs. Dr. Doctor. “But only just like any other father”.
– Richard Scarry, Dr. Doctor

“For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.” – Albert Camus, The Stranger.

“There he goes. One of God’s own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die. ” – Hunter s Thompson, Fear and loathing in Las Vagas

Яэль Авельсник

‘and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile, and cunning’. James Joyce ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’

You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe.

Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (Blade Runner)

Katy F

“Jean-Marc used to say that bread may not always turn out the way you intend it to, but it always turns out.”

“The roof collapsed, sending down a fresh avalanche of wood and nails, tarpaper and shingles and insulation. There was the sky, filled with flat-topped clouds, cruising like a fleet of anvils across the blue. George had the watery, raw feeling of being outdoors when you are sick. The clouds halted, paused for an instant, and plummeted onto his head. The very blue of the sky followed, draining from the heights into that cluttered concrete socket. Next fell the stars, tinkling about him like the ornaments of heaven shaken loose. Finally, the black vastation itself came untacked and draped over the entire heap, covering George’s confused obliteration.”

“Perhaps I have realized that to live for five minutes with one’s desires raised high and blood-red in one’s hands is better than a lifetime nursing an immorality of calm and rancid contentment on the grave of those desires.” -Gwyn Thomas, The Dark Philosophers

Perhaps this world will never conform perfectly to our needs—people
will always die before they are ready, perfect relationships will end
in ruins, adventures will end in catastrophe and beautiful moments be
forgotten. But what breaks my heart is the way we flee from those inevitable
truths into the arms of more horrible things. It may be true that every
man is lost in a universe that is fundamentally indifferent to him, locked
forever in a terrifying solitude—but it doesn’t have to be true that some
people starve while others destroy food or leave fertile farms untilled.
It doesn’t have to be true that men and women waste their lives away working
to serve the hollow greed of a few rich men, just to survive. It doesn’t
have to be that we never dare to tell each other what we really want,
to share ourselves honestly, to use our talents and capabilities to make
life more bearable, let alone more beautiful. That’s unnecessary tragedy,
stupid tragedy, pathetic and pointless. It’s not even utopian to demand
that we put an end to farces like these.

Days of love, nights of war
by Crimethinc. Collective

lauri

“Going too far, he said, was something everybody did sometimes. We didn’t pay much attention to this argument. We asked what kind of music he would like played at the hanging. He said he’d have to think about it but it would take him a while to decide.”

―Donald Barthelme, Forty Stories

carolyn

…a good carpenter, Cash is. He holds the two planks on the trestle, fitted along the edges in a quarter of the finished box. He kneels and squints along the edge of them, then he lowers them and takes up the adze. A good carpenter. Addie Bundren could not want a better one, a better box to lie in. It will give her confidence and comfort. I go on to the house, followed by the Chuck. Chuck. Chuck. of the adze.

William Faulkner, As I lay dying

Leo

“I am haunted by humans.”

— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

Sara Brostmeyer

“Hatred is like a long, dark shadow. Not even the person it falls upon knows where it comes from, in most cases. It is like a two-edged sword. When you cut the other person, you cut yourself. The more violently you hack at the other person, the more violently you hack at yourself. It can often be fatal. But it is not easy to dispose of. Please be careful, Mr.Okada. It is very dangerous. Once it has taken root in your heart, hatred is the most difficult think in the world to shake off.”
-Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“Anyone whose goal is ‘something higher’ must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”

“I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering
it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost,
like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece
of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden
eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.” – Jack Kerouac “The Dharma Bums”

zxcasq11

“Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are ‘it might have been’.” -Kurt Vonnegut, “Cat’s Cradle”

“Kids! Bringing about Armageddon can be dangerous. Do not attempt it in your own home.”- Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett “Good Omens.”

Mokasi

“In this box are all the words I know…Most of them you will never need, some you will use constantly, but with them you may ask all the questions which have never been answered and answer all the questions which have never been asked. All the great books of the past and all the ones yet to come are made with these words. With them there is no obstacle you cannot overcome. All you must learn to do is to use them well and in the right places.”

“Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done.
If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.
It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: it can be done.”

“The boy rode along through the desert for several hours, listening avidly to what his heart had to say. It was his heart that would tell him where his treasure was hidden”
-The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

iliveonwallst

“I have found that everything, no matter how bad, comes to an end.”
-The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay

“I wouldn’t kill your pony. I’d like to believe it, anyway. I’d like to
believe I wouldn’t drag you out in to the woods and leave you there,
either. So far, it hasn’t come up.”
― Richard Siken

Gretchen Schwab

“Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared? Ah, where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear? Where have they gone, those loafing heroes of folk song, those vagabonds who roam from one mill to another and bed down under the stars? Have they vanished along with footpaths, with grasslands and clearings, with nature? There is a Czech proverb that describes their easy indolence by a metaphor: “They are gazing at God’s windows.” A person gazing at God’s windows is not bored; he is happy. In our world, indolence has turned into having nothing to do, which is a completely different thing: a person with nothing to do is frustrated, bored, is constantly searching for the activity he lacks.”
– Milan Kundera, Slowness

Mat JS Moore

“Stare at him,” said Ghost. “They won’t bite you if you keep staring at them.”

Steve backed away. “They bite?”

Not really. They hiss at you, mostly. The only time geese are ever dangerous is when you happen to be standing on the edge of a cliff. I heard about a guy that almost got killed that way.”

By geese?”

Yeah, there was a whole flock of them coming after him. All hissing and cackling and stabbing at his ankles with their big ol’ beaks. He didn’t know you had to stare them right in the eye, and he panicked. They backed him right over a fifty-foot cliff.”

Mahlke’s Adam’s apple attracted attention because it was large, always in motion, and threw a shadow. Between me and Mahlke the caretaker’s black cat tensed for a leap. We formed a triangle. My tooth was silent and stopped marking time: for Mahlke’s Adam’s apple had become the cat’s mouse. It was so young a cat, and Mahlke’s whatsis was so active–in any case the cat leaped at Mahlke’s throat; or one of us caught the cat and held it up to Mahlke’s neck; or I, with or without my toothache, seized the cat and showed it Mahlke’s mouse: and Joachim Mahlke let out a yell, but suffered only slight scratches.

– Günter Grass, from Cat and Mouse

Matias Sebastian Cabrera Jara

”We all die. The goal isn’t to live forever, the goal is to create something that will” Chuck Palahniuk – Diary, a novel

“Yet, he was aware, perhaps for the first time in his life, that nothing would stop it, nothing: this was himself. Rufus was aware of every inch of Rufus. He was flesh: flesh, bone, muscle, fluid, orifices, hair, and skin. His body was controlled by laws he did not understand. Nor did he understand what force within this body had driven him into such a desolate place. The most impenetrable of mysteries moved in this darkness for less than a second, hinting of reconciliation. And still the music continued, Bessie was saying that she wouldn’t mind being in jail but she had to stay there so long.” — James Baldwin, Another Country

The Loopy Librarian

“One must always be careful of books,” said Tessa, “and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us.”

“I do not believe that men were meant for games, that that is their highest purpose. Work is nobler than play. I believe that men were meant for work, that their highest calling is to build, not destroy or even protect. Learning to fight, trying to embody the virtues of the hunter and warrior – these things are useful and important, even essential. But don’t be content with being a warrior, be a builder as well. Make something. The true calling of man, real manhood, is about creation, not destruction, and everyone secretly knows it.”

A Fighter’s Heart – Sam Sheridan

Guest

“It had been a bad night, and when he tried to drive home he had a terrible argument with his car.”
-Philip K. Dick, “The Game Players of Titan”

Guest

“It had been a bad night, and when he tried to drive home he had a terrible argument with his car.”
-Philip K. Dick, “The Game-Players of Titan”

eawesterhuis

“To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.”

“On the wall to the left of the desk were three very small shelves,
and on them were science primers and school books from which Rebekah had
taught and most of which she had bought with the money her mother gave
her for herself for drying peaches when she was a child. They were all
now very old. What she felt for them was what no one feels for the books
out of which they have been taught by another—it was what a full grown
doe might feel for a little mountain stream, which it had found for itself when it
was a very young fawn wandering quite alone and parched with thirst,
and from which it had drunk. It might have tasted of many finer clearer
streams since then, but in none of them all would the water be to it
like that in the little stream it found all for itself when it was a
small thing, quite alone, and dying of thirst.”
— Olive Schreiner, “From Man to Man”

David Jaworski

“It had been a bad night, and when he tried to drive home he had a terrible argument with his car.”
-Philip K. Dick, “The Game-Players of Titan”

Danielle LaCasse

“When He aim for something to be always a-moving, he makes it long ways, like a road or a horse or a wagon, but when He aims for something to stay put, He makes it up-and-down ways, like a tree or a man.”
-William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“Then you know how it will end,” Zina said. For the first time she seemed hesitant; she faltered. “I forget sometimes that you know everything.”
“Not everything. Because of my brain damage, the accident. It has become a random variable, introducing chance.”
“God plays at dice?” Zina said; she raised an eyebrow.
“If necessary,” Emmanuel said. “If there is no other way.”

VALIS: The Divine Invasion by Philip K. Dick

OfficeSuppliesIncorporated

The Way of the Samurai is found in death. When it comes to either/or, there is only the quick choice of death. It is not
particularly difficult. Be determined and advance. To say that
dying without reaching one’s aim is to die a dog’s death is the
frivolous way of sophisticates. When pressed with the choice of
life or death, it is not necessary to gain one’s aim.

We all want to live. And in large part we make our logic
according to what we like. But not having attained our aim
and continuing to live is cowardice. This is a thin dangerous
line. To die without gaming one’s aim is a dog’s death and
fanaticism. But there is no shame in this. This is the substance
of the Way of the Samurai. If by setting one’s heart right every
morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were
already dead, he pains freedom in the Way. His whole life will
be without blame, and he will succeed in his calling.

Hagakure (Hidden Leaves) by Yamamoto Tsunetomo

JimTodd

“Look.

No wait. Don’t look. Just…

Listen.

You don’t have time for fancy poetry. It’s almost as useless as having
your thoughts dictated to you, assuming you were even aware of that
happening, which you definitely aren’t. Cherubs aren’t prone to that
kind of self awareness. No way, absolutely not. Yes, you believe that
thought. The one you had just now, by your own volition, and now it’s
true reality. See? Yes, you agree totally with that thought you had.

Frankly you don’t know about stuff skimming holes or alertness to some
purely hypothetical flow of narrative or whatever. You’ve got MAJOR
PSYCHOLOGICAL PROBLEMS. You were meant to be a monster. To destroy
something huge and really important, perhaps repeatedly, and to be a
total shithead about it. You just haven’t found the road that’ll take
you there yet. Somewhere in this depressing empty lot of a session there
is a quest waiting for you. You are determined to squeeze more blood
from this pathetic stone than all the naturally occurring puppets in
paradox space keep in their squishy little torsos combined.

You stew in your own quasi-lucid hostility as you think this very
thought. The one right here, that feels like it’s being dictated to you,
you think. You think it feels that way, so you guess it’s true. But we
previously agreed that you were the sole author of your own thoughts,
didn’t we? That’s the thought you should be thinking, and more
importantly, believing in as hard as you can, thus slightly reducing its
stubborn fakeness attribute. You then think the word, HUH? That doesn’t
sound like a thought you would have, you think to yourself
thoughtfully. What the fuck? But seriously, you’ve got to stop this. If
you keep thinking thoughts like this, you’ll probably start going crazy.
And if you start going crazy, this desolate one player session will
start to feel a lot longer than it’s already going to, and more
specifically, than it already did. Still, you can’t quite shake the
feeling.

“I shall begin at the beginning,” said the D.H.C. and the more zealous students recorded his intention in their notebooks: Begin at the beginning. “These,” he waved his hand, “are the incubators.” And opening an insulated door he showed them racks upon racks of numbered test-tubes. “The week’s supply of ova. Kept,” he explained, “at blood heat; whereas the male gametes,” and here he opened another door, “they have to be kept at thirty-five instead of thirty-seven. Full blood heat sterilizes.” Rams wrapped in theremogene beget no lambs.

~Brave New World

Sam

“…they had believed in literature, had believed in Beauty and in personal expression as an absolute end. When they lost this belief, they lost everything. Money and fame meant nothing to them. They were not worldly men.”

Wow this is so generous, I would be happy with James Jean’s “Rift” alone. Just looking at those covers gets me excited, books have been my first love, guess that never goes away :)

It’s really hard to pick a favorite book and even harder to pick one passage (I know, yaddayadda) but for now I’d have to settle for the first “grown-up” book that had a major impact on me and stayed with me:

The Cider House Rules by John Irving

“And the thing about love,” Wally said to Angel, “is that you can’t force anyone. It’s natural to want someone you love to do what you want, or what you think would be good for them, but you have to let everything happen to them. You can’t interfere with people you love any more than you’re supposed interfere with people you don’t even know. And that’s hard,” he added, “because you often feel like interfering – you want to be the one who makes the plans.

“It’s hard to want to protect someone else, and not be able to,” Angel pointed out.

After all, what was adult life but one moment of weakness piled on top of another? Most people just fell in line like obedient little children, doing exactly what society expected of them at any given moment, all the while pretending that they’d actually made some sort
of choice.

-Tom Perrotta, Little Children

Kyle Matulevich

“I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”
Frederich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Kyle Matulevich

“I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Briel

I’m not sure what one human being
can do. I’ve never pushed myself to the limit. I thought I had, but I realize now I hadn’t. My self-tests were always carefully non-destructive.

Clare Foley

“You say dreams have no power here? Tell me, Lucifer Morningstar – ask yourselves, all of you – What power would hell have if those here imprisoned were not able to dream of heaven?”
– Neil Gaiman, Sandman

“Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms. It’s by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth! I talk nonsense, therefore I’m human”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

“All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.”
e.a.poe poems

Charles Tyler

“I liked, as I still like, to make words look self-conscious and foolish, to bind them by the mock marriage of a pun, to turn them inside out, to come upon them unawares. What is this jest in majesty? This ass in passion? How do God and Devil combine to form a live dog?”

―Vladimir Nabokov, DESPAIR

Nari M

“But I have my life, I’m living it. It’s twisted, exhausting, uncertain, and full of guilt, but nonetheless, there’s something there.”

– Banana Yoshimoto, The Lake

adamw

Isn’t it a pleasure when you can make practical use of the things you have studied? Isn’t it a pleasure to have an old friend visit from afar? Isn’t it the sure sign of a gentlemen, that he does not take offense when others fail to recognize his ability?

– The Analects of Confucius (Simon Leys English (duh) translation)

Lisa PArk

“The fact that the ruins receive us warmly and kindly after all, and that they attract us with their cracks and flaking surfaces, could this not really be a sign of the material taking revenge, having recaptured its original life?”
– Gutai Manifesto

Guest

“What had he to live for? What had he to look forward to? Why should he strive? To live in order to exist? Why, he had been ready a thousand times before to give up existence for the sake of an idea, for a hope, even for a fancy. Mere existence had always been too little for him”

Erin

“What had he to live for? What had he to look forward to? Why should he strive? To live in order to exist? Why, he had been ready a thousand times before to give up existence for the sake of an idea, for a hope, even for a fancy. Mere existence had always been too little for him”

-Fydor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

Peter Turner

“And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed”

“In the New Poland, the truths were separated from the untruths by decibels. The untruths were now proclaimed loudly with a brass band, relentless marching and waving banners. Toward the Bright Future. All Power to the Workers. Life Has Become Better, Comrades; Life Has Become More Cheerful. The Soviets Will Keep You Warm. Meanwhile , everything real was whispered, passed softly and meticulously from one person to the next. And so it would be for the next fifty years. The quietest sounds would be the most important ones.”

-A Long Long Time Ago and Essentially True- Brigid Pasulka

Hanna La Salvia

“so, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I’m still trying to figure out how that could be.” – Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Hanna La Salvia

“She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there, leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.” – J.D. Salinger, A Girl I Knew

“I walked up to the microphone, gulping and trying to think of something to sing about. I was a little blank in the head or something, and no matter how dam hard I tried, I just couldn’t think up any kind of song to sing-just empty…”

– Woody Guthrie: Bound for Glory

Nancy Mc.S.

“Sylvanshine had found himself locking eyes with thirty-year-old men who had infants in high-tech papoose like packs on their backs, their wives with quilted infant-supply bags at their sides, the wives in charge, then men appearing essentially soft or softened in some way, desperate in a resigned way, their stride not quite a trudge, their eyes empty and overmild with the weary stoicism of young fathers. Reynolds would call it not stoicism but acquiescence to some large terrible truth.” – David Foster Wallance, The Pale King (An unfinished Novel)

“Aomame visited several little rooms she possessed inside her, tracing time backwards the way a small fish swims upstream. She found there familiar sights and long-forgotten smells, gentle nostalgia and severe pain. Suddenly, from some unknown source, a narrow beam of light pierced Aomame’s body. She felt as though, mysteriously, she had become transparent. When she held her hand up in the beam, she could see through it. Suddenly there was no weight in her body. At this moment Aomame thought, “even if I give myself over to madness-or prejudice- here and now, even if doing so destroys me, even if this world vanishes in its entirety, what do I have to loose?” ” -1Q84, Haruki Murakami

Ben

“If you label it this, then it can’t be that.” Tom Wolfe – The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

“I will go directly to her home, ring the bell, and walk in. Here I am,
take me-or stab me to death. Stab the heart, stab the brains, stab the lungs, the kidneys, the viscera, the eyes, the ears. If only one organ be left alive you are doomed-doomed to be mine, forever, in this world and the next and all the worlds to come. I’m a desperado of love, a scalper, a slayer. I’m insatiable. I eat hair, dirty wax, dry blood clots, anything and everything you call yours. Show me your father, with his kites, his race horses, his free passes for the opera: I will eat them all, swallow them alive. Where is the chair you sit in, where is your favorite comb, your toothbrush, your nail file? Trot them out that I may devour them at one gulp. You have a sister more beautiful than yourself, you say. Show her to me-I want to lick the flesh from her bones.”
―
Henry Miller, Sexus

Lewis fishcakes

“Well,” said Pooh, “what I like best,” and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn’t know what it was called.”
“What I like doing best is Nothing.”
“How do you do Nothing,” asked Pooh after he had wondered for a long time.
“Well, it’s when people call out at you just as you’re going off to do it, ‘What are you going to do, Christopher Robin?’ and you say, ‘Oh, Nothing,’ and then you go and do it.
It means just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.”
“Oh!” said Pooh.”
― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

“We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.” – from the preface of The picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

“All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”

-James Baldwin “The Fire Next Time”

wendyposborne

“He had been alone in the world and empty for so long. But she filled him full, and so he believed everything that had been taken out of him might have been for a purpose. To clear space for something
better.”

“A black pig is like a tormented bat. Both the pig and the bat feel pain and anguish but they can not understand, they cannot know the true meaning or point of it.”

Racter, The Policeman’s Beard is Half Constructed

Sara Sremac

“Nature is a wonderful thing”

— Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

Sarah Deaner

“If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it walls, and we will furnish it with soft, red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweller’s felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn’t exist, and I have tried everything that does.”

“Give parents the tiniest of confidences and they’ll use them as
crowbars to jimmy you open and rearrange your life with no perspective. Sometimes I’d just like to mace them. I want to tell them that I envy their upbringings that were so clean, so free of futurelessness. And I want to throttle them for blindly handing over the world to us like so much skid-marked underwear.”

“He is gone on the mountain,
He is lost to the forest,
Like a summer-dried fountain,
When our need was the sorest.
The font, reappearing,
From the rain-drops shall borrow,
But to us comes no cheering,
To Duncan no morrow!
The hand of the reaper
Takes the ears that are hoary,
But the voice of the weeper
Wails manhood in glory.
The autumn winds rushing
Waft the leaves that are searest,
But our flower was in flushing,
When blighting was nearest.”

And the Grinch, with his grinch-feet ice-cold in the snow,
Stood puzzling and puzzling: “How could it be so?
“It came without ribbons! It came without tags!
“It came without packages, boxes or bags!”
And he puzzled three hours, till his puzzler was sore.
Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before!
“Maybe Christmas”, he thought, “doesn’t come from a store.
“Maybe Christmas…perhaps…means a little bit more!”

How the Grinch Stole Christmas, by Dr. Seuss

Matthew Angell

”His thoughts did those funny things they do when you bump your head and you suddenly find yourself thinking about what you had for dinner last Tuesday, all mixed up with seven times six.”

-Clive King, Stig of the Dump

Jsae

‘Au revoir, Giovanni.’

‘Au revoir, mon cher.’

I turned from him, unlocked the door. The weary exhale of his breath seemed to ruffle my hair and brush my brow like the very wind of madness. I walked down the short corridor, expecting every instant to hear his voice behind me, passed through the vestibule, passed the loge of the still sleeping concierge, into the morning streets. And with every step I took it became more impossible for me to turn back. And my mind was empty –or it was as though my mind had become one enormous, anaesthetized wound.

I thought only, One day I’ll weep for this. One of these days I’ll start to cry.

James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

indianaindah

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.” ― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

hamdainvincible

Woohoo! A book giveaway, my life couldn’t be better, it wouldn’t hurt to try.

“There are metaphysical rivers, she swims on them as that swallow is swimming in the air, going stunned around the bell tower, letting herself fall to stand up with the best impulse. I describe and define those rivers, she swims them. I look for them, and I don’t find them, I watch them from the bridge, she swims them. She doesn’t know, she is the same as the swallow. Oh, let me in, someday let me see how your eyes see”

– Julio Cortazar, “Rayuela” (Translated “Hopscotch”)

I had to translate it from the Spanish book, it Is so beautiful – I don’t know how is it in the English version if it exists.

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited.”
― Sylvia Plath

“The Noise is a man unfiltered, and without a filter, a man is just chaos walking.”

– Patrick Ness, The Knife of Never Letting Go

mrleedy

“I can hear the pigeons talking
I can hear the cripples walking
I can hear the desert sighing
I can hear the burgers frying
I can hear the pencils scribbling
I can hear the mongrels dribbling
I can also hear :
leaf blower
pneumatic drill
laughing
an aeroplane”

– David Shrigley, Human Achievement

Jsae

‘Love him,’ said Jaques, with vehemence, ‘love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters? And how long, at the best, can it last? since you are both men and still have everywhere to go? Only five minutes, I assure you, only five minutes, and most of that, helas! in the dark. And if you think of them as dirty, then they WILL be dirty–they will be dirty because you will be giving nothing, you will be despising your flesh and his. But you can make your time together anything but dirty; you can give each other something which will make both of you better–forever–if you will NOT be ashamed, if you will only NOT play it safe.’

“Even so, there were times I saw freshness and beauty. I could smell the air, and I really loved rock ‘n’ roll. Tears were warm, and girls were beautiful, like dreams. I liked movie theaters, the darkness and intimacy, and I liked the deep, sad summer nights.” ― Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance

I taught her to point and call out the five elements that make up the physical world; metal, wood, water, fire, earth.

I taught her what makes the world a living place; sunrise and sunset, heat and cold, dust and heat, dust and wind, dust and rain.

I taugher her what is worth listening to in this world: wind, thunder, horses galloping in the dust, pebbles falling in water. I taught her what is frightening to hear: fast footsteps at night, soft cloth slowly ripping, dogs barking, the silence of crickets.

I taught her the five tastes that give us memories of life: sweet, sour, bitter, pungent and salty.”

~Amy Tan, 100 Secret Senses.

denisez

“You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.” ― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calender that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from a chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table.
I spend my life learning to feel less.
Every day I felt less.
Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?
You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.”

“There was a horrible sound. The skin of his forehead distended as we yanked his head back. It stretched and distended until a sort of shelf of stretched forehead-flesh half a meter long extended from his head to the window. The sound was like some sort of elastic from hell. The dermis of Stice’s forehead was still stuck fast, but the abundant loose flesh of Stice’s bulldog face had risen and gathered to stretch and connect his head to the window. And for a second I saw what might be considered Stice’s real face, his features as they would be if not encased in loose jowly prairie flesh: as every mm. of spare flesh was pulled up to his forehead and stretched, I got a glimpse of Stice as he would appear after a radical face-lift: a narrow, fine-featured, and slightly rodential face, aflame with some sort of revelation, looked out at the window from beneath the visor of stretched spare skin.”

-David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

Sasha

“Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.”

– Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

Gracy Hawkins

“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see?”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass

Oliver

‘Like a killer forest fire, like cancer under a microscope, any battle or bombing raid or artillery barrage has the aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifference – a powerful, implacable beauty – and a true war story will tell the truth about this, though the truth is ugly.’

“I’ve been thinking with my guts since I was fourteen years old, and frankly speaking, between you and me, I have come to the conclusion that my guts have shit for brains.”

― Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

Doroty Hasanudin Sanussi

“… we absolutely mustn’t forget it. We mustn’t forget old people with their rotten bodies, old people who are so close to death, something that young people don’t want to think about (so it is to retirement homes that they entrust the care of accompanying their parents to the threshold, with no fuss or bother). And where’s the joy in these final hours they ought to be making the most of? They’re spent in boredom and bitterness, endlessly revisiting memories. We mustn’t forget that our bodies decline, friends die, everyone forgets about us, and the end is solitude. Nor must we forget that these old people were young once, that a lifespan is pathetically short, that one day you’re twenty and the next day you’re eighty.”

The Rioting had escalated over night and school was cancelled by midday.
“David Choe” by David Choe

Gaston

“And so, does the destination matter? Or is it the path we take? I
declare that no accomplishment has substance nearly as great as the road
used to achieve it. We are not creatures of destinations. It is the
journey that shapes us. Our callused feet, our backs strong from
carrying the weight of our travels, our eyes open with the fresh delight
of experiences lived.”

―
Brandon Sanderson,

The Way of Kings

WILBO

“I was gifted, am gifted. Sometimes I looked at my hands and realized that I could have been a great pianist or something. But what have my hands done? Scratched my balls, written checks, tied shoes, pushed toilet levers, etc. I have wasted my hands. And my mind.”
Charles Bukowski / Pulp

Tom Bevan

“He got on to the bed, and wretched open the lattice, bursting, as he pulled at it, into an uncontrollable passion of tears. ‘Come in! come in!’ he sobbed. ‘Cathy, do come. Oh do – once more! Oh! my heart’s darling! hear me this time, Catherine, at last!’ The spectre showed a spectre’s ordinary caprice; it gave no sign of being; but the snow and wind whirled wildly through, even reaching my station, and blowing out the light.”

English:
‘and I would not want to change with you
I would like to give money for
to just like you
be myself”

Ramsey Nasr, Een minimum (a minimum)

Sashiko

“I’m free, I think. I shut my eyes and think hard and deep about how
free I am, but I can’t really understand what it means. All I know is
I’m totally alone. All alone in an unfamiliar place, like some solitary
explorer who’s lost his compass and his map. Is this what it means to be
free? I don’t know, and I give up thinking about it.”

-Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

cristian oyharcabal

“There comes my wife to nag.’s Extremely jealous of my solitude there if you ever see me focused on something other than her, do not try by some means lose my concentration, make me lose the thread, the weather, spreading my juices brain in all directions. in my experience, it is a general law. Again the experience of some men I know. But it’s something not quite understand me well and quite spoiled life … ” The empty speech – by Mario Levrero

James Lee

All night sheetlightning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunder-heads, making a bluish day of the distant desert,

the mountains on the sudden skyline
stark
and black
and livid

like a land of some other order out there
whose true geology was not stone
but fear.

“Looking at it, Zeitoun realized that it was not one long cage, but a series of smaller, divided cages. He had seen similar structures before, on the properties of his clients who kept dogs. This cage, like those, was a single-fenced enclosure divided into smaller ones. He counted sixteen. It looked like a giant kennel.”
―Dave Eggers, Zeitoun

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”

-Carl Sagan (Cosmos)

Daniel Waller

“This is my heart. You are touching it with your left hand, not because you are left handed, although you might be, but because I am holding it against my heart. What you are feeling is the beating of my heart. It is what keeps my alive”

– Jonathan Safran Foer. Everything Is Illuminated

Salator

“Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they
know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a
general thing.”

– Robert E. Howard

Salator

“Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they
know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a
general thing.”

“The silence. The salitter drying from the earth. The mudstained shapes of flooded cities burned to the waterline. At a crossroads a ground set with dolmen stones where the spoken bones of oracles lay moldering.”

“When a woman says, ‘I have nothing to wear!’, what she really means is,
‘There’s nothing here for who I’m supposed to be today.”

―
Caitlin Moran,

How to Be a Woman

Kevin Moore

“It’s a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is
terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves?”

-The Secret History by Donna Tartt

Lusi

“And he was overcome with sadness. His flower had told him that she was the only one of her kind in all the universe. And here were five thousand of them, all alike, in one single garden!”
– The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Eleanor

“You may not believe in magic but something very strange is happening at this very moment. Your head has dissolved into thin air and I can see the rhododendrons through your stomach. It’s not that you are dead or anything dramatic like that, it is simply that you are fading away and I can’t even remember your name.”

– Lenora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet

Yael

“…If I had to tell you why I’m a painter and why I spread paint on canvas, I should say: I paint because I have no tail to wag.”

Albert looked with astonishment at his father, who had not spoken to him like this in a long time. “No tail? What do you mean?”

“It’s very simple. Dogs and cats and other talented animals have
tails; their tails, with their thousands of flourishes, provide them
with a wonderfully complete language of arabesques, not only for what
they think and feel and suffer but for every mood and vibration of their
being, for every infinitesimal variation in their feeling tone. We have
no tails, and since the more lively among us need some such form of
expression, we make ourselves paintbrushes and pianos and violins…”

~ Hermann Hesse , Rosshalde

Alex

“She was made after the time of ribs and mud. By papal decree
there were to be no more people born of the ground or from the marrow of bones. All would be created from the propulsions and mounts performed underneath bedsheets- rare exception granted for immaculate conceptions. The mixing pits were sledged and the cutting tables, where ribs were extracted from pigs and goats, were sawed in half. Although the monks were devout and obedient to the thunder of Rome, the wool of their robes was soaked not only by the salt of sweat but also by that of tears. The monks rolled down their heavy sleeves, hid their slaughter knives inthe burlap of their scrips, and wiped the hoes clean. They closed the factory down, chained the doors with Vatican-crested locks, and marched off in holy formation. Three lines, their faces staring down in humility, closing their eyes when walking over puddles, avoiding their unshaven reflections. ”

– Salvador Plascencia from “The People of Paper”

Carlos L.

“We are unusual and tragic and alive. We are disadvantaged but young and virile. We are the bright new stars born of a screaming black hole, the nascent suns burst from the darkness, from the grasping void of space that folds and swallows—a darkness that would devour anyone not as strong as we.”

“He always thought of the sea as la mar which is what people call her in Spanish when they love her. Sometimes those who love her say bad things of her but they are always said as though she were a woman. Some of the younger fishermen, those who used buoys as floats for their lines and had motorboats… spoke of her as el marwhich is masculine. They spoke of her as a contestant or a place or even an enemy. But the old man always thought of her as feminine and as something that gave or withheld great favours, and if she did wild or wicked things it was because she could not help them. The moon affects her as it does a woman, he thought”

– Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea.

Matt Kauffmann

“Thanks to the long days of rain, the blades of grass glowed with a deep-green luster, and they gave off the smell of wildness unique to things that sink their roots into the earth.”

“With other men, perhaps, such things would not have been inducements; but as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.”

I talk about the gods, I am an atheist.
But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar.
Distrust everything I say.
I am telling the truth.
The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol.
Aesthetically defined, a metaphor.

“I want to give a really BAD party. I mean it. I want to give a party where there’s a brawl and seductions and people going home with their feelings hurt and women passed out in the cabinet de toilette. You wait and see.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

‘It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choice we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured. I realised, somehow, through the screaming in my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them. It doesn’t sound like much, I know. But in that flinch and bite of the chain, when it’s all you’ve got, that freedom is a universe of possibility. And the choice you make, between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life”

“I again had the sensations of being tossed, spinning, and falling down at a tremendous speed. Then I exploded. I disintegrated. Something in me gave out; it released something I had kept locked up all my life…There was no longer the sweet unity I call ‘me’. There was nothing and yet that nothing was filled. It was not light or darkness, hot or cold, pleasant or unpleasant. It was not that I moved or floated or was stationary, neither was I a single unit, a self, as I am accustomed to being. I was a myriad of selves which were all ‘me’, a colony of separate units that had a special allegiance to one another…”

“Not those who had seen him last, but me who had seen him best, as if my memory of him were himself; and because your forget Robin the best, it’s to you she turns to.” (The doctor to Nora)
– Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

Guest

“I again had the sensations of being tossed, spinning, and falling down
at a tremendous speed. Then I exploded. I disintegrated. Something in me
gave out; it released something I had kept locked up all my
life…There was no longer the sweet unity I call ‘me’. There was
nothing and yet that nothing was filled. It was not light or darkness,
hot or cold, pleasant or unpleasant. It was not that I moved or floated
or was stationary, neither was I a single unit, a self, as I am
accustomed to being. I was a myriad of selves which were all ‘me’, a
colony of separate units that had a special allegiance to one
another…”

“…I’m a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.”

― J.D. Salinger – Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters

jena

“She thought that they had not greeted each other and that it was right. This was not a reunion, but just one moment out of something that had never been interrupted. She thought how strange it would be if she ever said “hello” to him; one did not great oneself each morning.”

“There are hundreds of substantiated oddities such as this surrounding tornadoes. A tornado once opened a barn door, pulled a wagon out, turned it around, wheeled it back inside, and closed the door. A phonograph recording of the song Stormy Weather was once found wedged into a utility pole after a tornado had swept through the area. A butter churn once dropped out of the sky and landed on a cow’s head, half an hour after a tornado had hit twenty miles away. Chickens are routinely stripped of their feathers, and the feathers are sometimes found speared into planks of wood. In 1974, a farmer reclaimed a mirror, a carton of eggs, and a box of Christmas ornaments – all undamaged – from the otherwise total wreckage of his house. A tornado in 1996 even had the audacity to hit a drive-in movie theatre in Canada while it was screening the movie Twister.”

“the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“No longer may we speak of the topaz sea which laps our breeze-kissed shores. Nor ever again describe azure-tinted horizons sheered by the violent blazes of our brilliant island sunrises. Hundreds of words await ostracism from our functional vocabularies: waltz and fizz and squeeze and booze and frozen pizza pie, frizzy and fuzzy and dizzy and duzzy, the visualization of emphyzeema-zapped Tarzans, wheezing and sneezing, holding glazed and anodized bazookas, seized by all the bizarrities of this zany zone we call home. Dazed or zombified citizens who recognize hazardous organizations of zealots in their hazy midst, too late—too late to size down. Immobilized we iz. Minimalized. Paralyzed. Zip. Zap. ZZZZZZZZZ”

—Mark Dunn, Ella Minnow Pea

Marcos Velez

” In all likelihood my true subject may prove to be simply the wind— its changing nature, its rough and whispering characteristics, the various spices of the world which it brings together suddenly in hot or freezing gusts to alter the flavor of our in- most recollections of pleasure or pain—simply that wind to which my heart and also my skin have always been especially sensitive.” —John Hawkes, Second Skin

nordic_gloom

“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off – then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”